Ricky Gervais has made no secret of how much he doesn't like President Trump. He doesn't like religion or Tories or anything "conservative" at all, really.
But comedians aren't supposed to be conservative. Nor are they supposed to be the sort of boot-licking pearl-clutchers keen on fluffing the egos of Hollywood millionaires while mocking the banalities of the common man. Gervais knows this, and thus he threw a side-splitting grenade into the town at Sunday's Golden Globes, deconstructing the entertainment industry and in the process, comedy itself.
Gervais spent his opening monologue targeting a billionaire pedophile and his powerful enablers, big businesses bending the knee to the Chinese dictatorship, and rich celebrities criming their children's ways into college. Not one word alluded to Trump, his policies, or his supporters. In fact, he warned the show's attendees not to use the night to pontificate about politics.
"You know nothing about the real world," he reminded them. "Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg."
Naturally, given our incredibly stupid times, his radically apolitical act became a political lightning rod.
Republicans, including Donald Trump, Jr., who is apparently unfamiliar with Gervais's previous comments about his father, celebrated the act. The Left started hand-wringing.
Vox pre-empted Gervais's performance with the accusation that his humor, again, which regularly takes the wealthy and powerful to task, as "punch[ing] down." Slate called him "just plain mean" for his bits, including a resoundingly true dig at Leonardo DiCaprio's penchant for barely legal women.
"But at the Beverly Hilton, where the three-hour-plus ceremony took place, the mood was already sober thanks to an impeachment, the threat of war with Iran and devastating bush fires in Australia," the Los Angeles Times fulminated of Gervais's performance. "The last thing anyone needed was for the smirking master of ceremonies to reprimand them for having hope, or taunt the room for trying to use their influence to change things for the better."
And thus, his diatribe against Hollywood became a didacticism on comedy.
Gervais's posture as the fat man berating the powerful at their own party is a schtick as old as the genre of comedy itself, reminiscent of the ancient Greek chorus or court jester hired expressively to entertain by holding the powerful to account. Presumably, the most lauded actors in the country have some familiarity with the role of fools challenging kings in Hamlet and King Lear, even if they had to SparkNotes it.
Gervais is no revolutionary, but our schizophrenic era of excoriating job creators while celebrating professional pretty people as thought leaders and moral paragons, his willingness to perform honest and subversive comedy is.
Gervais didn't rely on any outlandish rhetorical tricks to elucidate the obvious. Half of the Beverly Hilton's attendees cavorted with Jeffrey Epstein after being credibly charged with pedophilia, and it's beyond an open secret that the same celebrities sobbing about climate change can kill about a gram of environmentally toxic cocaine on a slow night. The same people popping a Valium with their chardonnay at Craig's because they're so apoplectic over Drumpf couldn't care less about their private jets lighting their city on fire or the homelessness epidemic just a mile away.
Gervais just said what we were all thinking, with the unflinching tact of the best in the business of comedy.
Gervais isn't a radical. The tone-deaf response to his performance is.
"Hollywood" - Google News
January 06, 2020 at 09:29PM
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Ricky Gervais is no radical next to the self-indulgence of Hollywood - Washington Examiner
"Hollywood" - Google News
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